


leave these islands as soon as you can

by silkkat



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Grieving, Minor Character Death, examination of alexander's shit childhood, tbh not meant to be taken that seriously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 07:34:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8093581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silkkat/pseuds/silkkat
Summary: To Alexander, childhood in the West Indies, mid 18th century, was a barrage of tragedy upon tragedy. But Alexander Hamilton just couldn't seem to die. 1st person pov.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> tbh there's no actual plot devised by yours truly, just a chronicle of what happened to alexander as a kid. approximately based on history w/ chernow taking up 60% of my research, which I acknowledge is kinda a problematic source, but eh

James Hamilton, whom both Jamie and I periodically addressed as Father and Sir, was a strange man.

I’ve always found it odd that, as the son of a distinguished Ayrshire laird, he was born into an affluent family of Scots and into a position engrafted with social recognition and innumerable advantages, and yet James Hamilton chose to settle in the West Indies, the second most uncultured place on Earth. When he failed to attain the elusive _nouveau riche_ status, he remained and assimilated into this land of Negroes and degradation, even when every opportunity to sail back to Scotland presented itself. Why?

That a man may father two sons out of wedlock and by all appearances love one more than the other, is a mordant perplexity. I used to cling to Maman and ask, “Is it the nature of fathers to favor their firstborns?” when Jamie wasn’t nearby, and she would never have a satisfactory answer, or even an answer. I remember that whenever Father returned from some mercantilist crusade in the untempered lands of lore, Jamie and I would line up at the door of our ramshackle house to greet him. Father would make some benign inquiries, rub Jamie’s head, and on occasion give him tired, amiable smiles. It was my job to pretend to be unperturbed by the cold glances and sullen silences he gave me instead. (Father’s distance, I suppose, was preferable to his periodic burst of spleen as he stumbled back home, in the dead of the night, reeking of rum. Jamie and I both dreaded the instance.)

As a very young boy, whose voracious curiosity knew no bounds, I loved to throw a torrent of questions about my readings at whoever was near. Thus through trial and error had I learned very early on that Father cared not for my scholarly habits. With swift embarrassment, I’d stuff my copy of Alexander Pope’s _Dunciad Variorum_ under a pillow or hide it behind my back, but Father would frequently notice and remark upon it with disdain. “Rachel,” said he, addressing Maman, “Your sorry runt of a son is overcome with sloth. Smothers himself everyday with those books of his, talks like an apothecary. Shouldn’t you do something about it?”

Though, for a brief time when I was four, I’d gone to a Jewish school in Nevis, our parents had not the sufficient funds for proper, long-term schooling. But it was just as well, for the same undulating whisper pervaded our minds— _What decent school would accept us?_ —like vengeful shades. It was no surprise the St. Croix parish turned his back on us, citing the rumors of Maman’s promiscuity as reason enough to deny us education. (We all found that, while father boasted of his origins, Maman’s past was a forbidden subject. We knew little of her. That she was a Huguenot was certain; French rolled off my brother’s and my tongues with ease. But anyone who knew her saw that she was damaged, that she suffered from the kind of translucent wound we dared not prod.) I collected books; books won from adults with honeyed wiles, bought with half prices, bargained for with sly blandishments, two of them stolen from a young Gideon Thatcher I didn’t quite like. Political treatises. Pope’s poetry. I poured over Machiavelli’s wisdom in the candlelight: _Il y a deux manières de combattre, l’une avec les lois, l’autre avec la force. La première est propre aux hommes, l’autre nous est commune avec les bêtes._ I committed his words to memory, for I knew I’d have use of them in the future.

\--

“Jamie,” I whispered in the dark.

My brother’s breathing on the other end of the room wasn’t slow and drawn-out, so I knew him to be awake.

He huffed. “We’re supposed to be asleep.”

“Jamie, I’ve – I’ve been wondering. Are we really what the other children say we are?”

“What? We’re what?” Jamie’s reply was sharp.

I was fidgeting. Radiating with distress. “Don’t pretend you don’t hear the whispers. They say—they say—”

“What do they say?” Jamie bristled.

“We’re, well, baseborn. Bastards. And because of that we’re dirty and… and ‘tainted’, somehow. The other boys say that word a lot. Tainted. Thomas called me a ‘dirty whoreson weasel’ yesterday, and while I think there’re better ways to phrase the insult, I suppose that’s what we—”

“No!” Jamie had leapt out of his bed. “We’re not. We’re—I mean…” He gulped. “Maman and Father, they didn’t marry, it’s true. But we’re not dirty or, or… _tainted_. Whoever you heard that from, whoever it was; they’re wrong. They were only parroting their parents.”

“Why do their parents say it, then?”

“They don’t know any better. They’re ignorant, is all. They’re ignorant and they’re gossipers. They don’t have anything better to do but make things up. If Father were there… Well, Father’d have them eat their words; he always sets things right. Listen. Listen, okay? We are _not_ tainted,” Jamie said in a defensive, rapid manner. “Say it again and I’ll have Esther sew your mouth shut. Go back to sleep.”

I turned over to face the wall, unconvinced.

\--

My favorite pastime was finding ways to make quiet, immovable Ajax break into laughter. It was rare, it was uncharacteristic, and so I liked it. I liked the way Ajax’s cheeks tugged at the edges of his mouth, revealing the little gap between his front teeth. I liked the way his eyes narrowed into crescents.

“I’m not making this up, I promise! I told you, I read it right here in this great big book, and it says that Minos’ poor wife—”

“Pa-si-phae,” Ajax remembered, pronouncing the word carefully.

“Yes, Pasiphae—” I giggled. “She was made by Poseidon to fall in love with his _bull_ , and can you believe that by the nonsense laws of mythology they somehow they made a child? Well, not what we’d call a normal child. Something more like a monstrous creature or abomination that probably looked near-identical to a demon—oh, y’know, a demon with horns and hooves, and ah! I bet it has brown or dirty black hair all over, too. And so this monster-child turned out to be famous Minotaur, yes _, that_ one, and they had it stay in a maze that’d contain all its monstrous fury and God knows whatever else, I mean quite obviously besides all that hunger for human flesh and thirst for human blood…”

Happy to simply listen, Ajax grinned contentedly at me, as was his habit. I was doing it again, I knew. Running on and on with my sentences. (It struck me, then and there, how much I valued his gentle presence, how grateful I was that I had him to listen to my rambling incoherence, free of reprimand.)

“…and there’s a whole second half to the story which I think I’ll save for another time,” I concluded, “But tell me, Ajax, wouldn’t you agree that mythology is so… so absurd, so wild and interesting? A world of centaurs and nine-headed serpents and love-sick gods and Dryads who run from love-sick gods. I’m saying, if I spent a day with nothing but my own thoughts and this book for inspiration, the next day I could write so many stories such as these…” I glanced at the book in my lap. _Treasury of Classical Legend_ , its cover read.

Ajax waited for me to calm down and collect my thoughts. I looked at him. “These stories. They’re centuries old. They’re from an old place called _Greece_. Do you know where that is?”

“I don’t,” Ajax said.

“Greece is a faraway land, an old place in Europe. The bit that looks like a boot? No, that’s Italy. Well, back in the ancient—the old, _old_ days, Greece was this place where thinkers like you and I would go and do nothing but, nothing but…”

“…think,” Ajax amended.

“Yes! We’d do nothing but think; think and write and talk about the world, and we wouldn’t have to worry about making money like Father does all day, and we would be living in a _democracy_ —you don’t know the word yet, it’s rather complicated, I’ll teach it soon—and, and you wouldn’t have to work, and we’d nearly always be happy, and we’d think so hard that we’d probably think magical creatures into existence…”

Ajax laughed again, and I responded in kind. “I like that,” he said. “Sounds like _bliss_ to me. Did I use that right?”

I nodded. “Ajax. Where you’re from, do they have a mythology too?”

And suddenly his dark eyes were distant, wistful.

“I never got to know. I was young when I came here. Proper young. I never had anyone teach me our… mythology.”

And there was nothing with which I could respond.

Even at age eight, I was no fool. (No one could accuse me, in any time of my life, of being a fool.) I knew from whence Ajax had come.

It was morbid curiosity at work when I would sometimes watch an auction from afar. (Maman never permitted it, but I was nimble-footed in escaping her limited attention.) Ivory skin bathed in the sheen of sweet. The stench of bile, seawater, and the wooden floorboards of the ship from which they departed. The way they shuffled, barefooted, onto the block; the way they gazed out into nothingness. All civility from the buyers a façade in the scramble for the biggest prize.

Ah, the biggest prize. The most muscular, the most resilient, the most robust. The one who demonstrated exceptional docility. The one who could carry more than a mule. The one who looked fecund. At age seven I’d learned to examine worth, examine what my Caribbean neighbors valued in a slave. I knew that these gentlemen merchants, clad in blue and gold, subsisted on the comfortable sensation of looking upon their coffle of helpless inferiors and knowing them to be physically strong but mentally vacuous.

A year later I saw them stuff a black boy—a boy like – _like Ajax_ —into a bag and dump him in the harbor. I saw the boy wail and beg, saw him being dragged by two large bearded men, saw a moment later a bag that writhed with flailing limbs and muffled screams, its opening sealed by a rope, saw the way water swallowed him whole, saw the man clap the other on the back, heard the other man laugh, heard him say, “Good riddance; blubbering wretch was as useless as the damn clap. Won’t be missed, surest thing.” I felt myself growing sick and my throat constricting, the repeated murmur of _wrong wrong wrong wrong_ _wrong_ envelop my legs as I frantically fled the scene. Is this what they did to the worthless?

Ajax was walking solemnly at the doorstep, carrying a water pitcher, when I stumbled back home.

“Alex? What’s wr—”

I pulled him close and sobbed into his shoulder. Against his body I could feel his bewilderment (I wasn’t a boy much prone to tears), but he never stopped rubbing my back with one hand, an emptied pitcher dangling in the other. Ajax—my Ajax—

“It’s okay, Alex. Everything’s all right,” he murmured. No, nothing was all right. I had, against nature and against propriety, befriended a Negro. I’d maintained an inseverable connection with a slave, a connection more meaningful that any I’d forged with my own brother or father. And now I would never rest easy, wondering constantly when I would be punished for the perversity of my attachments, wondering when powerful men would take powerless Ajax and toss him into the ocean.

I wouldn’t tell him what I saw. I couldn’t. But that shade of unidentifiable pain in his eyes told me that, somehow, he _knew_.

Afterwards, I looked at myself. Examined the impression my appearance gave: the leanness and the bony shoulders; the rickety legs. I was the small boy with pale, freckled skin that looked that he should have wilted under the sun long ago. Physically, I was objectively worth very little. Powerless, like Ajax. Only Whiteness saved me from being tossed into the ocean.

The salve to this thought was knowing that worth could operate on different scales. Slave worth was, very simply, tied to largeness and brawn, but the worth of free men was more complicated; it was everything from wealth to pedigree to intelligence. The revelation that worth could be mobile came sudden and quick. I saw hope in this. I saw my path, laid out before me in the shapes of parchment and quill. Yes, I would be valuable, so valuable they would not dare touch me. (And if I rose high enough, shone bright enough, I could stop them from forcing their grubby hands on Ajax and taking him away.) I would rise from my miserable place in this miserable place, and I would prove that I had worth, and I would _win._

\--

I huddled in close to Jamie that night, underneath our staircase. Father’s voice, roughened with outrage; Maman’s voice, hoarse from swallowed tears. Combined, the sound reached us like muffled claps of thunder.

“I cannot believe you!”

“James, please…”

“If I had known, if I had _known_ , that you were yet another whore fresh out of Corinth—”

“Come, now—”

“That you were married from the start, to _another man_ , I swear, I’d not have veered an inch towards you or your-your ruined commodity! If I had known our dalliance was built on your lies, Rachel, I’d have never agreed to your nonsense!”

“My nonsense? My _nonsense_ —choosing to start another life, away from the ogre who beat me, threatened me, locked me up—and by God, you know not of Lavien, you know not of his barbarism—is-is nonsense?”

“Yes, what with your acting the innocent young wench, ensnaring me with your charms, having me endure… what, fifteen years and a wasted youth of abject misery…”

A growl.

“Were all these years spent with us truly this miserable for you, James? With your sons and with me? Does responsibility frighten you?”

Father laughed coldly.

“Don’t play games with me, Rachel. We all know one of them’s not mine.”

I went rigid.

What?

“We’ve been through this,” Maman spat. “There has been _nothing_ improper between Thomas Stevens and me, not a stray glance, a touch, or murmur. You are paranoid to think—”

“I have about every reason to think—”

“—that just because Ned looks just a little bit like your youngest son—”

“…because of course you’d be fucking all our neighbors—”

“—and just because Stevens was kind to Alex that one time—”

“…and so what did I expect from a woman who—”

“—that I would enter a secret tryst with a friendly stranger because he looked at me fondly or lecherously like men always do, have him fuck me silly in his own house the day we were invited over, in the room right next to his wife, and, I suppose, risk everything by conceiving his child and claiming it to be yours and having you raise it for ten years! I don’t know if it’s water or bees or the damn alcohol that’s gotten into your brain these past years, because you used to be a man of sound judgment!”

Silence. My heart was pounding so hard it hurt.

“Ten years, and not a whit more.”

“What?”

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re—Y-you… you can’t. We won’t survive on my—”

“I’m _leaving_ , Rachel. My linen business has been in shit condition for years now. My rich, bloated brother’s refusing my pleas for money. I’ve told you I have nothing left, and even if I did, I’m done providing for a whore and her wretched progeny. You’re a leech on my wellbeing.”

“You would abandon—”

“Yes,” Father said with an air of magisterial finality. “I would.”

There was a pause.

“I hope you find comfort in your wine and depravity,” said Maman, quietly. “Take what you want: your papers, your bottles, your shattered ego, your unrealized ambitions… Prance off into the merry sunset and never come back.”

I remember Jamie running for Father and me running for Maman. I tried to ask what we could do to make Father return, but Maman shushed me. “ _Il est un merde embulante_ ,” she snarled. “ _Il a toujours_ _é_ _t_ _é un sale égoïste._ Better that _soûlard_ stay gone.” Her words filled me with dread. This was my _father_ whose name she was cursing? Would thunder boom and the skies heave with disapproval? During the day and ensuing weeks our father left, Jamie spoke not a word to me. I felt his reproach and his anger simmering beneath the surface, as if after Father left something in him had also vacated.

I sat in confused silence in the corner of our room, trying to make sense of it all. Trying to pinpoint the blame. (Ajax made an attempt to approach me, as one would a skittish animal, but I yelled and chased him out.) Was it Maman? No, that couldn’t be. She’d said the words, ‘never come back’, but that had been the flame held at the mouth of a powder keg—no, then. Was it Jamie? Jamie had been the dutiful son. The good son. The careful, obedient son. He was everything I wasn’t and couldn’t be. Was it _me?_ Had _I_ chased my father away?

Was it me? Was it me?

No. Yes. _No…_

It was my damned books. My rude, smart tongue. He had always berated me for my questions, my ceaseless avalanche of irritating, uncomfortable questions, and if I’d had simply made more of an effort to please him, to show him that I wasn’t solely interested in the philosophies of Hobbes and that I _could_ and _would_ follow proudly in his footsteps as a financial pillar… It was my intimacy with Neddy, bordering on brotherhood, that had planted the infernal idea in his mind, for if I’d not been so imitative of and familiar around Neddy and induced Father to perceive some _phantom likeness_ in our features… And it was my appearance. If I’d had only grown to the height Jamie’d grown to at my age and not been this ungainly little thing with the stature and frailty of a twig…!

Ah, frailty. No wonder. No wonder Father had left. I was always so weak and so prone to sickness, so frequently ill that whenever I made the slightest cough in the preamble of a fever he would throw his hands in the air and rummage the house for coins. When the word ‘bastard’ had run free and frequent from the mouths of adults and children alike, “sickly” had invariably accompanied it. The medical expenses alone had crippled him… crippled my family. Nibbled away at his love until he had none remaining to give.

So he left. It really was no wonder.

\--

1767, September. The weather was plain and unassuming. Ajax had gone out. Maman was gathering some petticoats from the clothesline, and I disturbed her with the one thought that had tormented me for years.

“This island is a mass of knaves and murderers, is it not, Maman?”

She cast a startled look upon me. “Why?”

I bit my lip, considering how best to voice my concerns. Now, before I ran out of the courage to voice them. “Oh, it’s only that I’ve been thinking…” (She rolled her eyes: _You’re always thinking._ ) “How are we to be civilized when our daily subsistence on barbarity is little cause for offense?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. She looked to be wondering, for the thousandth time, where I’d learned to use such big words. ( _You’re eleven, for heaven’s sake,_ said her eyes.)

“I only say barbarity, because, well, the slave trade—the way people here conduct it… Is it not in all appearances a barbaric institution? The lashings. I see them every day, in the town square. Deaths from preventable illnesses. Deaths from the sea journey. Deaths from—from deliberation. I suppose the entire thing is convenient and necessary and all, but I think it a wonder that we condone its crueler aspects.”

Maman’s laugh was hollow. “It is condoned because this is the way of the world.”

“Oh, ‘the way of the world’. But I’m wondering if that set in stone or if it’s because humans made it so, because it’s hard to imagine this all as _God’s_ intention, and honestly, who’s to say the ‘way of the world’ can’t change? Maman?”

She silently pursed her lips, and then said, “You might just be right. Nevertheless, it’s best not to dwell on such subjects, lest people despise you for it.”

“But I’m only speaking the truth!”

“ _Mon Alexandre_ ,” she reached over to smoothen the crease on my brow, “You are too bold and too honest. It will be the end of you someday.”


	2. Chapter 2

It was a month from a New Year that committed us all to gloom—the year 1768, I shall never forget—when everything was broken to pieces.

The room was damp and windowless, the heat suffocating and unbearable. Maman and I were in the same sickbed, twitching and writhing with fever. Maman’s arms were around me, even as I retched and coughed into a filthy bucket.

The Ancient Greeks were industrious enough to imagine an infernal river of fire, the Phlegethon, for the eternally damned. The fever felt like the waves of the Tartarean Phlegethon then, crashing over me again and again, beseeching me to capitulate and drown. But I wasn’t a Pagan, I wasn’t a spirit, and I wasn’t eternally damned. I was Alexander Hamilton, destined for greatness; I was alive and I intended to remain alive _. So that I can prove my worth_ , I promised myself in the misty haze of semi-lucidity. The flames took my body, but the part of my mind, from which all my aspirations sprung, was unyielding: _I’ll do all the things I’ve always wanted to do, sail to Europe and study Law and Medicine and Latin and Hebrew and Greek and—at a university, and I’ll make my way in the world, they’ll never know I’m a bastard they’ll never know anything I won’t let them think anything I have to be irreproachable I have to be spotless—and I’ll come back bursting with knowledge and wealthy and married and I’ll prove I’m Father’s son and make Father proud and I’ll… and I’ll…_

When I awakened, the worst of my delirium gone, Maman’s arm around me was cold and stiff.

“I’m sorry, young man,” a voice above me said.

I opened my mouth to scream, to sob, to plead, to weep, to rail against the heavens, but it was too dry to comply. So instead I clutched uselessly at Maman’s body until they had to pry it away from me.

_This is the cost of survival. You wanted to live, so Death took her instead._

After a day of forlorn recovery in a bed that was once shared, I watched everything else unfold with a kind of numb wonder.

The five men who came in the dead of the night and sealed the entrance to our home, the parish clerk at the nearby St. John’s Church who denied Maman a burial, and the doctor who shoved at us the heap of medical bills—they wore identical masks of distasteful apathy. The town judge who edged over to Jamie to hand him some money ‘for shoes’, our cousin Peter Lytton who patted us hesitatingly on the backs, and the scant handful of Maman’s acquaintances who came to pay their respects all wore the same uncomfortable, pitying half-smile. I don’t know what I hated more.

They’d be auctioning off our slaves, I heard, or directly handing them over to my half-brother, Peter Lavien. They were taking Ajax, like I’d always thought they would. A part of me had long reconciled myself to the cold reality of this, but to hear it pronounced aloud was an altogether different thing. Ajax. Those fiends. Those thieves. Those giants. How could they? _How could they?_

Jamie and I did nothing at the court hearing but sit in mute acquiescence as Peter Lavien took everything—Maman’s house-slaves, her belongings, our home, our inheritance—from us, and sit in mute outrage as Johann Lavien called us ‘obscene children’ conceived in ‘whoredom’.

“Embarrassments such as these,” the Dutchman sneered, “should be locked up – or, or stoned in the streets. If I had my way I’d have them put out of their misery.”

_…they’ll never know anything they can’t ever know anything I can’t let them—_

And then… Well. I got my thirty-four books back. Some silver spoons. A hat.

\--

I wrote a mythical ballad for Ajax in the moonlight days later. Painstakingly. I’d spent hours inserting all the words that I’d surreptitiously taught him to read over the years. It was supposed to become a simple conclusion of our relationship. A goodbye I’d not had the prior chance to deliver.

His new master was adjusting his cravat and picking at the flowers in his garden when I trudged up to his face, a roll of paper buried up my sleeve.

“Ah, it’s you,” said Lavien the elder. “Greetings. What a surprise.”

I tried to speak, but my voice was lodged in my throat. His vicious eyes bore into me…

“Sir,” I managed. “Forgive the intrusion. I’ve come to ask a rather negligible favor of you. I’m only here to bid farewell to one of my… l-late mother’s former slaves before we are separated… indefinitely. I know it’s a strange request, but it is my wish he and I talk one last time. That’s—that is all, sir.”

His weary gaze started morphing steadily into a body-seeping evaluation, disgusted and critical. “Been slumming with an African, have you?”

“I—I don’t…”

“Ha! I’d been expecting the vermin to swarm.”

“I beg of you, sir,” I intoned, the words heavy like lead, “I only require a moment with him, alone.”

“Think you can steal him back, do you, boy?”

“Nothing of the sort,” I snapped, giving up all pretense of deference. “As a final visit it is little else than an endeavor at human kindness, as I’m positive is little found in the residents of this hideous painted monstrosity you call a house. Let me speak to the slave whom you _stole_ by your skewed moral grounds, and the matter will be settled.”

The man started shaking with cold, incredulous laughter. With his every guttural bark of mocking glee I felt my defiance ebbing further and further.

“Pompous and disrespectful,” Johann Lavien wheezed after the fit had subsided. “As inherited from one cheating wife of mine… ah, former wife. No. I’d like you to shove your pretty _endeavor_ up your arse and forbear from ever undergoing a second one anywhere near me or my son. You have some nerve coming here, I give you that. Now _get out of my sight_ , you disgusting little byblow, before I decide to cave in your ribs.”

“Sir, I—”

His hand curled into a fist. “Get. Out.”

\--

They took him. They took Ajax. And I couldn’t stop them. This helplessness I felt, this _impotence…_ I couldn’t stand it.

\--

It wasn’t humanity, but the scarcity of all else to feel, when Jamie and I were bustled into the Christiansted home of Peter Lytton and became quite pitiful of his condition. Peter Lytton bore his fits of manic depression with not an iota of shame, as if disheveled hair half out of its queue, rum-stained shirts, and heavy-lidded eyes were his declaration to the world that he was a degenerate and proud of it.

It soon became apparent to me that Lytton, a widower and an indolent man whose business dealings had invariably crumbled and decayed, had a mind as astute as that of a pigeon. His words were slurred, his movements fumbling and boorish. In conversation he was slow and witless, responding seconds late to questions with nothing but recited platitudes. But he was kind to us, or at least he made the effort to seem so. We had a roof over our heads and full stomachs. I had my books. Ledja attended to our needs. I decided that if I was busy enough the pain of recent tragedy would not resurface.

“If we’re to settle here comfortably,” I told Jamie one afternoon, determined to break his melancholy silence, “Then it’s time we get actual jobs. The both of us. As you know, _I’ve_ already gotten a foothold in that old trading firm, and I’m fully certain I’ll be put to good use.”

“Alex,” Jamie drawled, “you’ve told me of it _ad nauseum._ Beekman & Cruger.” He gave me a tired smile, where a bit of his old humor returned. “What, and upon meeting you, weren’t they immediately charmed by your ‘startling intellect’, as you say?”

I waved an impatient hand. “Yes, it’s true I was required to wheedle that dogged Mr. Cruger for five days until he would finally relent, even when _he_ was the one needing a capable worker in his store and _I_ was the one offering my services—he’d said something about my constitution and my _size_ , damn him—but at least I managed to convince him in the end. I’m to be a clerk! Won’t you rejoice for me?”

“I’ll rejoice when you bring us back some coin,” he said, retrieving a speck from his eye.

“I will. I’ll bring back enough that we’ll never be poor again, be able to buy our own bread, and—” I lit up with a familiar thought—“enough that I’ll be able to go to New York for college, where Neddy’s studying at.”

Jamie shot me a look that I took to mean: _You’re convinced of that and I don’t have the energy to tell you it’s a hopeless dream_ , and returned to his melancholy silence. But I was impressed with him. This was the most he’d said to me all week.

We shared a little room, which I furnished with notes of my readings. Lytton’s son hadn’t harassed us for quite a while, which was cause for some satisfaction. I was starting to think that perhaps things were finally going well for us, that perhaps this was where we would find quietude and stability.

That day, I heard noises and knew it wasn’t my business to care, but Jamie was curious. He was tugging the edge of my sleeve and leading me to our cousin’s room, all long-relinquished playfulness and reverie, when we came to a jarring halt at the door.

I—I knew he was in low spirits, but I wasn’t expecting… expecting....

This.

Papers torn into shreds; an overturned bowl with its half-rotten contents spilt across the wooden floorboards. Peeling wallpaper. Shards of glass clinging in every corner. Peter Lytton’s mutilated corpse sprawled across his bed, deep crimson fanning out beneath him with the profane symmetry of a bird’s severed wings; mouth agape, eyes unseeing. Little red flecks of his shredded entrails. A knife gripped with dead fingers. The murky scent of alcohol and blood pervading the room with the intensity of an Old Testament plague, soon intermingled with the stink of my vomit.

My brother’s choked voice. “Oh God, is he…? Did he…? We–we have to… We have to go fetch someone—Alex, stop it. Get _up!_ ” Jamie was shouting in my ear. I think it was he who wrenched me off of my knees and us both out of the room.

For a while, they were everywhere. His eyes. Peter Lytton’s terrible, lifeless eyes. Plastered on brocaded walls, on open ceilings, on furniture. They could not be dispelled, and they followed me everywhere. The eyes were there at the court ruling, when the judge declared it an act of suicide and Lytton insane; they were there on the parchment where I scribbled my disjointed musings on birds and rocks and all manner of arbitrary things, those periodic eruptions of a frayed mind; they were there on the ground as I stared at my own feet at night. They were there in that dark alleyway, where I stumbled and fell and decided to lay curled on the flea-ridden ground—for what was the point of getting up? Where the dam I’d been carefully building fell apart and I wept and screamed at the damned things to just _go away, God, just leave me alone_ — _why can’t you just leave me alone?_

While alive, Peter Lytton had been kind to us, but in death he bequeathed nothing to Jamie and me, confirming my suspicion that his kindness had been but a social nicety at best, a deception at worst. Soon afterwards, Peter Lytton’s grief-stricken father James Lytton took some pity on us, tried to argue that we deserved more, but made sure to promptly die and leave us nothing as well. ‘Quietude and stability?’ As if the affection of an elder, much less the charity of a nigh-stranger, had ever proven reliable or sustainable. I’d learned that lesson when one parent had fled and another had been interred, and I should never have forgotten it.

As always, people whispered.

“The man killed himself, yes, but he had to do it in the bloodiest way possible.”

“Why not an old-fashioned hanging? Was he so determined to exit with a dramatic flair?”

“They’re saying his will left everything he had to that mulatto son of his.”

“What of those Hamilton boys under his care?”

“Penniless and as good as dead. Seldom does the world sing songs of bastard orphans…”


	3. Chapter 3

Christiansted was an aesthetic oddity. With the unbroken rush of business whisking men to and fro, few natives truly stopped to drown in their surroundings, but it _was_ what many a sensible outsider would call a paradise. The sky was a shade of hot, radiating azure. The sun was a glowing ornament. The warmth in the air was the pleasant, comfortable kind that beckoned one out of the house. The daily crash-and-fall of the ocean air threatened, sirenlike, to lure the busy, world-weary man into its embrace. Salty high-mountain winds of the town rolled over tiled roofs to tousle the sinewy leaves of banana trees, which sagged with heavy fruit and nested birds.

But _paradise_ is a word for quixotic fools. Looking out of the window of any house situated on the hilltop was always a moment of repose and disturbed fascination. There was much to see: slave-women balancing baskets upon their shoulders, merchants in heated argument, merchants in grudging agreement, butchers gripping slain animals by their legs, a drunkard slinking out from a tavern, a polemicist accosting people on the street, bands of wealthy children chasing each other’s coattails, slave-boys scurrying here and there with slips of paper for their masters. And much to hear. The chirping, barking, and yowling of endemic creatures. The ceaseless yelling of “coffee for sale, coffee for sale—coffee, the natural stimulant for the soul and body—get your coffee _tax-free!_ ” from shopkeepers who surely must’ve hated their jobs. The coquettish chatter of unwed women who considered themselves too refined and too delicate for these Islands, but who still yearned to catch the admiring eye of a wealthy trader. On the other end of the street (the dustier, tawnier end): the taunts and whistles of repulsive men long out of their prime, returned by women with either scorn or erotic sycophancy.  People put on masks of polite courtesy, all the better for lying and scheming, while others didn’t bother. People swatted at their necks and wonder if mosquitoes were the Lord’s stupid, nonsensical joke. People spat on each other’s boots when cheated in a financial transaction or deprived in competition of a good whore to take home. People sung slurred gibberish from bloated lips and pissed into cracks of the pavement. People stole and whined and cursed and dribbled at the mouth. People regressed into apelike idiocy. Yes, Christiansted was an aesthetic oddity. One should say it was a beauty, but whose idyllic allure was a veneer; and whose heart dripped with avarice, resentment, corruption, vulgarity, and all points of the varying spectrum of human ills.


End file.
